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Free consulting for Path, interviewing the CEO of Instagr.am, and my love of Quora

I’ve really been getting into Quora, a new Q&A service that was started by a former CTO of Facebook. I’m not sure why this one took for me, where there have been many others, but I think it’s just the smart community that’s sprung up on this service. I almost didn’t blog about it, because so far there’s been some of the best discussions of technology and startup help I’ve seen anywhere and I didn’t want to see that watered down, but when something is good I just have to share it, so here we are.

It’s interesting, but there’s something that makes it easier to write there than here. Weird, huh? But here I have an idea that there’s an audience that’s known me for a while. Over there everything seems fresh and new. Plus, here, I have to come up with my own questions and ideas. Over there I can just respond to other people’s questions and ideas.

Which leads me to last night. I have been playing a lot with photo sharing services and have been spending a lot of time thinking about why I don’t like photo-sharing on the iPhone app Path as much as I like Instagram and what I would do about Path to make it better than Instagram. So far 18 people have voted it up, which tells me there’s something there that resonates with the audience hanging out on Quora, so thought I’d point it out here.

But there’s something else going on with Quora. It builds a page of everything you do on the site which is a new form of blogging. For many people who aren’t used to regularly posting and trying to build an audience this is an awesome way to share ideas and get used to trying to find things that’ll get other people to respond. I imagine we’ll see a new group of journalists spring from Quora. For instance, you can follow me and see everything I’ve written so far on Quora. Funny enough I’ve been doing a lot more words there than here. It’s like a place where I can try something out on a smaller audience, then move it to the blog when it’s baked. I wonder what Dave Winer or Mike Arrington would think of this, probably think I’m nuts.

Speaking of Path and Instragr.am, the other day I met Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagr.am. They announced over on Quora that they just passed 300,000 users after only being out a month, which is quite good for an iPhone-only application. We had a nice chat, in audio, on my iPhone, of course, about Instagr.am. and where he sees the service evolving.

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Robert Scoble

As Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company, Scoble travels the world looking for what's happening on the bleeding edge of technology for Rackspace's startup program. He's interviewed thousands of executives and technology innovators and reports what he learns in books ("The Age of Context," a book coauthored with Forbes author Shel Israel, has been released at http://amzn.to/AgeOfContext ), YouTube, and many social media sites where he's followed by millions of people. Best place to watch me is on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble
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